Healthcare Environmental Services Week

Improving Patient Satisfaction

While getting patients the care they need to get better is the priority in a hospital environment, keeping them comfortable during their stay is also essential. Not only will their comfort impact their impression of the hospital, it also impacts their mood and may even affect their recovery. Besides, when going about your daily duties as a nurse, it’s always much easier to do your job well and to keep a positive mindset when patients are calm and cooperative.

Boosting Staff-Wide Efficiency

If you’ve ever tried working in a dirty, disorderly environment, you know how distracting a lack of cleanliness can be. In the hospital environment, a high level of cleanliness isn’t just beneficial to patients; it’s beneficial to healthcare workers as well. As a nurse, for instance, clean patient rooms are essential for providing care safely and efficiently. Ease of access to sterile equipment also makes it much easier to do your job quickly so you’re able to handle a large patient load. Can you imagine how hard it would be to handle all of your patient-care tasks in addition to general housekeeping duties?

Now, with those contributions and the countless others that your housekeeping team makes, you might be interested in a few extra ways to show your appreciation for their efforts. Here are some ways that healthcare organizations throughout the country express their appreciation to their housekeeping personnel:

Professional Housecleaning

Paying for professionals to come in and clean your housekeepers’ homes is a great way to show how much your organization appreciates their efforts. Additionally, by giving your housekeepers a break from cleaning their own homes, you’ll be giving them some extra time away from their day-to-day duties at home, which helps to prevent burnout and may improve their performance at work.

Work-Related Gifts

As mentioned earlier, work-related gifts can be given to show appreciation. These gifts help demonstrate the value of housekeeping’s contributions to all members of the healthcare team, not just those responsible for keeping the hospital environment clean.

Gift Certificates

Personalized gifts are great, but only when they’re able to show that you really know a person. If you aren’t especially close to the people responsible for cleaning your unit, gift certificates are an excellent alternative. Amazon offers a huge selection of gift cards for popular retailers, movie theaters, restaurants, and more.

Personal Recognition

While receiving gifts to commemorate a job well done is great, having others recognize one’s hard work is often more meaningful. If your organization doesn’t have a system in place for recognizing the outstanding members of its housekeeping team, maybe it should put one in place. Doctors and nurses are often recognized in this manner, and since housekeeping staff are a part of the same team, they really should be too.

Do you have some outstanding members of your housekeeping team? If so, do you have a special way of showing your appreciation for them? Please share your ideas with our readers in a comment below and help make this year’s Healthcare Environmental Services Week memorable for environmental-service workers throughout the nation!